How to Use Oktopost to Manage and Track Your Social Media Activity

Want a social media management solution that really tracks what you do and tells you what Return on Investment (ROI) you get from sharing content?

Want support for sharing across LinkedIn Groups as well as the usual suspects (Twitter, Facebook etc.)?

What is Oktopost?

Oktopost is a social media management solution that is particularly focussed on the B2B space. It provides facilities for management and measurement across several social media channels and also boasts very good support for LinkedIn groups.

What are the main features?

Google Analytics integration – When you create a campaign for sharing content, Oktopost can automatically add tracking codes that relate to the campaigns. This is then visible within Google Analytics. Normally, adding these tracking codes is too time consuming to do, yet it’s extremely important so having this functionality available is great.

Social sharing plugin – Through the Chrome or Firefox plugin you can share content as you are browsing the web.

Integrations – There is support for integration with Marketo, Salesforce, Bit.ly and GoToWebinar. This depends on the subscription you have in place.

Lead capture – You can direct people from social channels to a form on your website that uses Oktopost code. This means you can track a link, right to the point of conversion.

Social inbox – For any content you share on social media channels, you can monitor responses through the social inbox and respond to any interactions.

Streams – You can set up streams to monitor content coming in from various channels. You can also set up a stream based on a keyword to track relevant topics.

Reporting – Good reports available on content sharing, leads generated, likes, comments, retweets etc. The reports are exportable to Excel or as a csv file.

Message assets – You can set up pre-defined content and use that as a template when sharing out content. You can also create a queue of content to be shared out over a specified period, taken from message assets.

How does it work?

Initial Preparation work

1. Add your social profiles

This is similar to any social media management system. You pick the social media profile you want, connect the profile to your account, and then you’re ready for sharing.

2. Add team members

Depending on your license, you will be able to add team members to your profile.

3. Set up Google Analytics

This is a really important and useful feature. When you share a link out on social media channels, you can’t track the result of people clicking on this link in Google Analytics without adding tracking codes. For every link you share, you need to manually add these tracking codes which is time consuming.

Oktopost automatically adds these tracking codes so you can look under the campaign section of your Google Analytics account and see the result of any link shared. For example, if you shared a link on Facebook, did people click that link and then sign up as an email subscriber or became a fan?

The tracking codes’ standard name is ‘UTM codes’. Here is the configuration screen within Oktopost:

This is where you set up the global settings for the campaigns

Each of these parameters is added to the end of the links you share so that Google Analytics can understand more about the link. For example, utm_source could be the channel you are sharing the content on. By putting in %social_network%, Oktopost will automatically replace this with Facebook, Twitter etc. as appropriate.

You can set these global settings up but you can also set up different settings for each campaign (see later for details on the campaigns).

4. Set up other integrations

You may want to connect other products, for example Marketo.

5. Set up lead capture

If you want to track whether you are generating leads as a result of the content you share, you can add lead capture code to any subscription box on your site. For example, if you want to see if people sign up as an email subscriber, you add relevant code to that box and then, within Oktopost, you can track if this actually happened.

How to share content

Once you have everything set up, you are ready to share content.

Oktopost gets to you set up a campaign. A campaign is a way of isolating the content you share, for reporting. For example you might have a standard campaign for your day-to-day sharing of activity and then have a specific campaign set up exclusively for a webinar that you are promoting.

When you have created a campaign, select the option to share content. Select the relevant social networks and then you can choose to either share immediately or you can specify a time in the future for it to go out.

Sharing content to relevant social networks at a specified time

You can share content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ and there is good reporting available for the content you share. For example, when you share to LinkedIn groups, you can track which groups you are getting interaction on.

When the content is scheduled, it is displayed in a calendar. This helps you plan out your content to make sure you have sufficient content scheduled over any given time period.

Message Assets – This is where you create content in advance and then select this content when you are sharing out individual items. You can also create a queue of content and get Oktopost to automatically send it out for you.

Create your messages and set up the auto scheduler

Social Inbox – This is where you can respond to comments on content that you have shared.

Streams – Streams are columns of content related to your social networks. For example, set up a stream to monitor mentions of your username on Twitter, or set up a stream to monitor a specific keyword.

Set up streams to monitor messages from different social platforms

Reports – You can access overview reports showing the results of any content you have shared out on social media.

Lead Tracking – You can add code to your website so that any leads collected as a result of social media activity can be displayed within Oktopost.

What could be improved?

Report flexibility – The reporting is good but I’d like to see more flexibility so that I could set up custom reports based on my specific requirements.

Dashboard – There is a standard dashboard showing overall performance. I’d like to see the ability to add/remove widgets so it is customizable based on my own needs.

Streams – At the time of writing, ‘Streams’ was in beta so I’m sure there will be more functionality added. We’d like to see more flexibility in relation to the keywords you can set up for monitoring, e.g. multiple keyword combinations, wildcards etc. The development team are currently working on this.

RSS Feeds – We’d like to be able to set up RSS feeds to auto-share our own and other companies’ blog content.

Overall Opinion

Oktopost is a really good platform and their focus on tracking campaign content and conversions is particularly good. They also have very good support for LinkedIn groups, if that’s an area that is important to you. If you are working in a B2B environment, you may well find that Oktopost is is particularly suited to your requirements.